Ma Yanhong

Boers-Li Gallery is pleased to announce Ma Yanhong’s solo exhibition, “Artists’ Portraits”, opening Thursday, November 22, 2012. This would be her first solo exhibition in Beijing since 2007. Ma Yanhong graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2002 and became a central figure of N12, participating actively in all N12 exhibitions (N12 was initiated by twelve CAFA students in 2003 to do group projects and exhibitions together, and this group of artists has since become a symbolic representative of their generation of artists). Ma is known for her portraits of young women, scarcely clothed, staring out of the canvas directly at the viewer, putting both the subjects and the audience at risk of vulnerability.
Interested in the human figure from the beginning, Ma Yanhong painted her first artist portrait in 2002 as a graduation project from CAFA. Unsatisfied with the regular “model drawing” class, Ma Yanhong took the curriculum in her own hands and portrayed herself and three other classmates, all of them close friends with each other. Gathered in a deserted classroom they took “model” photographs of themselves. These photo sessions became an artistic routine for Ma Yanhong’s paintings: She sets her models in a specifically generated setting to pose in action for the camera, and then she recaptures what was on film on canvas. To her, painting is a way to do what cannot be done in the real world—a painting is an alternative existence where all impossibilities of society become possible in painting. By revolutionizing the model painting class in this manner she brought Chinese painting decisively closer to real life
Open:10am-6pm